On Monday 2 March, Internet Archive Europe co-hosted an afternoon of conversation that felt, in the best possible way, like a homecoming. Together with Creative Commons and Open Nederland, we welcomed practitioners, policymakers, and advocates from across the Dutch heritage sector to our Amsterdam space for an event entitled “Ensuring equitable access to heritage in the digital environment: A leading role for the Netherlands on the global stage.”
The occasion was an opportunity to celebrate something real: the Netherlands has, for more than two decades, quietly and consistently set the standard for how cultural heritage institutions can open up their collections with integrity, imagination, and public purpose. Getting the people doing that work into the same room, alongside international partners, felt both timely and overdue.
Why the Netherlands, Why Now
The Dutch heritage sector’s track record on openness is not accidental. It reflects sustained investment, institutional leadership, and a genuine commitment to the idea that collections held in trust for the public should be accessible to that public.
Saskia Scheltjens from the Rijksmuseum Research Library captured this with a precision I found genuinely moving. The Rijksmuseum launched its digital collection in 2011, opened Rijkstudio in 2012, and completed the digitisation of its entire collection of one million objects in 2023. Rather than driving visitors away, free and open online access has brought more people into a relationship with the collection. As she put it: “Innovation requires infrastructure.” That is as true for open heritage as for anything else.
Edwin van Huis, who serves on the Internet Archive Europe Advisory Board, made the case for scaling this ambition to the European level. He pointed to DiSSCo — a Dutch-led initiative bringing together 1.5 billion specimens, 5,000 scientists, and more than 400 institutions across 23 countries — as an example of what becomes possible when openness is treated as a design principle from the outset.
Amanda van Rij from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science introduced the National Strategy on Digital Heritage and the Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed (Digital Heritage Network) Manifesto, which has already been signed by over 200 institutions across the country. Her framing was one I hear echoed in much of the policy work we do: digitisation changes how heritage is created, shared, and experienced, and that transformation demands a careful balance between intellectual property on the one hand and the public interest in access to our collective memory on the other.
The Open Heritage Statement and Our Future Memory
For Internet Archive Europe, this event was also an opportunity to draw out the connections between two initiatives we care about deeply: the Open Heritage Statement, led by Creative Commons and the Open Heritage Coalition, and our own Our Future Memory campaign.
When I presented on the second panel, aptly steered by the moderator Maarten Zeinstra from Open Nederland, I tried to show how these two efforts speak to the same underlying concern from different angles. Our Future Memory focuses on the basic rights that memory institutions need in the digital environment: the right to preserve, to lend, to provide access to knowledge across borders, and to engage in research and education. The Open Heritage Statement takes a broader view, calling for equitable access to public domain heritage and the removal of barriers that prevent people from participating in cultural life.
They are complementary. One focuses on the legal and institutional conditions under which memory institutions operate; the other articulates the values and principles that should guide how heritage is made available to the world. Together, they map a more complete picture of what an open heritage ecosystem actually requires.
Claire McGuire from the International Federation of Library Associations & Institutions (IFLA) made this point powerfully. The Open Heritage Statement, she observed, addresses issues well beyond copyright. It frames access to heritage within the wider context of access to information, and it does so at a moment when the landscape is becoming more, not less, fragmented. Uncertainty about artificial intelligence is already producing regression and backsliding in some areas. A global shared framework, with a home at UNESCO, offers a counterweight to that fragmentation.
Jan Bos, Chair of the UNESCO Memory of the World International Advisory Committee, placed the Statement in a longer institutional history. The Memory of the World Programme has been focused on protecting documentary heritage since 1992, and the 2015 Recommendation on the Preservation of, and Access to, Documentary Heritage laid important groundwork, including commitments to public domain access and open licensing. But the 2015 Recommendation covers only documentary heritage. The Open Heritage Statement extends those principles to all forms of heritage, making it a genuinely valuable complement — and potentially the basis for a more comprehensive international framework.
That framing matters to us. Internet Archive Europe operates in the spaces where documentary heritage, digital preservation, and open access converge. Seeing those concerns reflected in a global instrument with a home at UNESCO is not a small thing.
What Progress Looks Like, and What It Does Not
Douglas McCarthy from the Open Future Foundation offered some useful honesty. Roughly 1,700 cultural heritage institutions worldwide have released some data openly, corresponding to around 100 million objects. That is real progress. Article 14 of the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive has brought greater legal clarity in Europe, and the positive growth curve in online access to heritage is genuine.
But he also named what is still missing: compliance regimes are weak or non-existent, practices and policies remain deeply fragmented, and some prominent Dutch institutions are still erecting barriers around public domain heritage, perpetuating business models that no longer serve the institutions or the public they exist for. Driving change, he argued, comes down to individuals with the leadership and vision to experiment.
That observation feels true to us. At Internet Archive Europe, we see it every day. The legal frameworks matter enormously, and we will keep working to strengthen them. But the choices made by people inside institutions — what to digitise, how to licence it, whether to share it freely — are where the actual transformation happens.
Looking Ahead: Paris in April
This event was, as Brigitte Vézina and Brewster Kahle reminded us in their closing remarks, a prelude. The Netherlands is well-positioned to help set global standards for heritage access, and the international law stage offers a real opportunity to make that influence felt.
Creative Commons is organising a follow-up event at UNESCO House in Paris on 29 April 2026: “How Can Equitable Access to Heritage Help Solve Global Challenges? An Exploratory Dialogue.” We hope many of the people in the room on Monday, 2 March will be there. If you are not yet registered, you can do so at openheritagestatement.org/dialogue. The Our Future Memory campaign continues to grow. If your institution has not yet added its voice, we encourage you to do so at ourfuturememory.org. No organisation is too small — and the breadth of the sector matters as much as the weight of its largest members.
